Introductory Introduction

The contents of this post are directly related to the direction I will be taking Crymore, going forward. Very little of this applies to any of the other authors (which at this point… really only means kokujin-kun), but considering the main output of Crymore is my responsibility, this will have a significant impact on the site. As such, it’ll be stickied for at least an hour, cuz it’s important desu.

I’ve relied on reader feedback for pretty much every notable aspect of this website. So please feel free to pipe up in the comments section. If none of you ever set me straight, I’d probably be just another stupid fucking normalfag by now.

New Direction? Why?

The sense I’m getting from y’all is that fansubs are boring. Even I can’t be assed to watch fansubs anymore and I’m… well, I’m me for Chrissake. While Crymore in 2014 had bigger numbers than previous years (across the board), I don’t believe many people actually cared about the results of the fansub reviews. And if none of you have a horse in the race, how fun is it when I put one down?

The Proposed Direction

If we look at anime blogs as a combination of four factors, this is where Crymore currently is, versus where I think we should be (conceptually; this isn’t really accurate from an actual numbers perspective):

Current %

Proposed %

Episodic

0

10

Editorial

20

60

Niche

80

30

News

0

0

While I do have the final say, I’m not into alienating my audience, so remember how I asked for feedback earlier? Yeah, please give me it, as hard as you want.

Since the table doesn’t really explain much, let me break it down a bit.

Episodic/Editorial Posts (“Articles”):

I can’t really plan out or detail standard editorials, since those are usually based on current events. But serials? Sure.

Revamped:

Weekly

Let’s Read

It’s happening again. I can’t promise for how long, but it’s happening.

P-Tuesday Pollday

Aniblog Tourney 2014

I never forgot about this.

Non-Weekly

Conventions

Turning Japanese

Video Games

New:

Buyfaggery, non-weekly (this shit will generally require me to have access to my collection, and I can’t guarantee on a weekly basis when that’ll be)

There is little value to having this be a page by itself. I mean, this was originally a hidden post that only the most curious readers would ever bother with. It only got turned into a page for convenience’s sake.

As you probably already realize, a significant amount of the value from HDSWW comes from the conversation around ongoing series, which under the current format only gets more and more stifled as the season drags on. This, however, will provide a weekly impetus for discussion. We’ll make it fun.

Niche (Fansub Reviews):

Crymore’s already at the top of the scene; there’s nowhere else to go. The competition’s non-existent (pretending it even existed in the first place) — NotRedReviews failed, SubBusu failed, 8thSin failed, Watashi’s fansub now, Ji-hi failed, Subcompare failed, Fansub.co is dying… Like, really, where’s the pressure to improve?

My biggest (only?) innovation in 2014 was adding in webms. I wanna tear something up, but I’m just sitting here, getting fat off my own success. Fuck that noise.

Junketsu no Maria (this wasn’t even close to #5, but let’s pretend it was)

Assassination Classroom

Saekano

Koufuku Graffiti

Tokyo Ghoul Root A

Kantai Collection

Translation parties at priority over standard fansub reviews. (These are way, way more popular than the poll results suggest, so putting these at priority is my form of fanservice.)

Fansub reviews as a whole at a lower priority than articles.

Due apologies to everyone who hoped I’d stop wasting my time on a dead scene entirely.

+Authors

More authors is generally a good thing. Details forthcoming, but don’t hold your breath, cuz I don’t have anyone lined up.

If you’re interested in applying early, the first qualification is you have to be better than me at something. Sorry fansubbers; “nothing” doesn’t count.

More

If you thought that was a lot, you might wanna skip this spoiler. There’s a lot of detail that I mostly just wrote to keep my mind straight.

Contents:

Cleanup

Aesthetics

Schedule

Spoiler:

Cleanup:

I think some of your RSS feeds have already been hit by my cleanup efforts. And by that I mean re-tagging, re-categorizing, changing post visibilities… Basically, autistic shit that I don’t think actually matters, but I like doing because it seems like it would. I probably won’t be doing too much more on the post visibility side, but just a heads up that you might get spammed again in the next few days as I keep organizing.

Aesthetics:

While I understand you may have a laundry list of visual improvements, please understand that my blogging skillset is limited to making off-color puns about English mistakes. So if you’ve got a suggestion, please keep it dumbed-down enough that I can implement it.

Header: You’ll see this change once I get cleanup done. Not… exactly certain what I’ll change it to. Probably just gonna play around with it unless you’ve got some ideas.

Side bar: The social media bullshit is now being moved to author profiles. This will help with author differentiation and make it more obvious that we’re engaging in the same useless dick-measuring contest every other vapid cunt with access to the internet does. I still hate social media, and the hits we get from it aren’t even worth the time it takes to share the links, but I understand that some of you use it to keep abreast of Crymore updates, so I’m not gonna drop it anytime soon.

Off topic: I’m gonna look into making this display the most recent comments first. Everyone who visits the OT should understand why.

Schedule

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

P-Tuesday
Pollday

HDSWW

Aniblog
Tourney

Let’s Read

Monday->Thursday is risky to schedule anything, due to work. I can write the Pollday on Sunday and just schedule it for Tuesday, though.

HDSWW at Friday is aggressive, but I need that pressure or I’d spend all day Saturday on it. Aniblog Tourney on Saturday, because I can be flexible with how much I want to post (keep in mind while Crymore is my primary hobby, I still have a social life that I like to keep isolated from the internet). Let’s Read on Sunday is… well, from filming to posting, I don’t expect it’ll take much more than an hour of “effort”.

We’ll be starting with the new schedule this Tuesday, and just see how it goes. I anticipate modifications may be required, but who knows? Maybe I’ll get it right on the first try.

At this point, I’m going to have to reluctantly admit that articles are a lot more interesting than fansub reviews. I mean, I’m finding a lot of the time I’m just skimming through the script section going “Yeah, yeah, mistakes, mistakes, wow how’d that get through?” and then going straight for the drama in the comments.

Since you’re asking for suggestions, stuff I found really interesting (especially when I first found this site) were articles on grammar and editing, for example the one on usage of ellipses. Articles like that got me a lot more interested in the whole business of editing, both in fansubs and outside.

But I’m glad you’re still keeping the fansub reviews. Can’t lose the source of drama that defined this site, after all.

Killing them off straight up wouldn’t feel right. But I’m glad (well, in a way) that I still have a feel for how people are reading my posts. This shouldn’t feel like a routine or a chore for anyone, so hopefully this new path will fix that.

Got any suggestions for what kinda grammar posts you’d like to see? English has… more than a few topics I could discuss on the site.

I have shit taste and dig things like kfx, so I mostly looked forward to your opinion on groups’ kfx.

That said, I hope you continue to review subs that have caused a lot of drama, anger, rage, attention, etc., because I found those were always the most enjoyable and popular reviews.

The most recent example I can think of would be Anonymous’ Yurikuma Arashi, where you reviewed it just because it was so incredibly shit. Similarly with Watakushi and Hadena releases. Another example would be people asking for Fedsubs’ Assassination Classroom to be reviewed after they were talking all big and calling other groups “nobody groups”. You know, the sort of releases where people actually care a lot to see what the subs were like.

Oh, and I can attest to people wanting you to put your dick in things. I’m still waiting for an indepth onahole guide and review so I know which to buy!

I did actually try to avoid focusing on failsubs before, because the reviews felt too easy to write. But now that fansub reviews are supplementary, I suppose I don’t need to feel guilty about heading down that route. \o/

I like the idea of reviewing a script that’s caused a lot of drama. For example, like when you reviewed Commie’s Nisekoi to see if the A+ was justified. There was so much drama regarding that A+ decision because of shit like “monkey aids”, so it was nice to get a review.

>Standard fansub reviews for the Top 10 vote getters, only.
I’ve mentioned this before, but the poll is basically a popularity poll, while I think it should be a “I-can’t-decide-which-subs-to-watch-help-me-DS” poll. It’s not like it mattered in past seasons, where you put out a review a month, but now…

Should I limit the poll to the review queue? That way, only the people who *really* want reviews will bother voting.

And the point of this schedule and this post as a whole isn’t really to say “Hey, look, I’m going to post 50 times a day and shit will be fucking amazing god you’re going to get pregnant from all this literary love sauce”. It’s more about site direction and priorities.

It’s been a while since that one beautiful day I decided to protest mediocre anime tiddies with you, hasn’t it? I do still read most of the sub posts. I think they’re the most interesting. I can understand they’re probably a lot more effort than they’re worth, though.

Such venom. I mean, I don’t come to your site and use poorly thought-out metaphors to try and hurt your feelings. Well, nobody goes there anyway, but maybe that’ll change now that I’m no longer slowing down the Good Ship Fansubbing. Who am I kidding, of course it will!

“The sense I’m getting from y’all is that fansubs are boring. Even I can’t be assed to watch fansubs anymore and I’m… well, I’m me for Chrissake. While Crymore in 2014 had bigger numbers than previous years (across the board), I don’t believe many people actually cared about the results of the fansub reviews. And if none of you have a horse in the race, how fun is it when I put one down?”

I dunno, I cared, but…I get the feeling that I’m probably in the minority. I’d rather wait for even the small improvements most fansubbers put into their releases these days (*sigh*), but I guess download numbers don’t lie.

If you’re going to do fansub reviews for only 10 series a season, i’d prefer it if you abolished the current poll system. In it’s place, readers would vote for 3 series in the comments. You’d tally the totals and the top 10 would be your picks for the season.

This makes more sense because this way people are less likely to just vote for their favorite shows. The people who comment are the ones who know what the site is about. It’s more likely that people would make votes based on the current fansub scene.

We’ll still see some highly-popular shows (that are being subbed by only one group) slipping through the cracks, but I think the poll results would definitely be better overall.

I support this idea.
Most of the poll votes belong to idiots who don’t even know what groups sub the show. So anime with a single CR edit wins when something with Funi vs original TL vs edits rots in the corner because it was less popular among masses.
Basically, put value of reviews above shallow popularity.
One of the reasons why I stopped coming to the site was because the important stuff (as Qrius said ““I-can’t-decide-which-subs-to-watch-help-me-DS””) was being put off for too long.

I specifically come here to get an idea on which versions of shows you and other people think are the best options. The results from translation parties work quite well for this, but I also like to read an overall impression.

However, I almost never actually read through any review or participate in a TP – I read any summary at the start and then just go straight to the results. I use these to give me an idea of which groups to avoid for a show and which are particularly good, and then I use my own criteria (i.e. which subs are easiest to read) to make the final decision.

I also factor in votes for groups on myanimelist.net.

Without this input I just have to go for whichever subs I find easiest to read. But that may mean that I pick one with a crappy translation (although overall I’ve found that those that care enough to make the subs readable tend to get the best results in the reviews or TPs).

Same here. Translation Parties are too much of a hassle for me and lack the glorious D_S ban hammer of fansub justice. They are missing your thoughts and grades.
How about combining TPs and normal reviews (like putting your thoughts to the presented lines and a nice conclusion in spoilers). Like that you will save your time to write an review article for each fansub group and shift the focus to the show reviewed. Currently you already compare fansubs from different groups anyway in some of your articles.
Like that the category “Review” can be used for VN, BD, Game and other reviews in which you actually review the content of the item.

I am a fan of both formats. Whatever feels better for you. The whole reason for the new direction is for you to feel less burdened by them and rather have fun!
Both would also lessen your workload… I think?

For vidya… if I can’t relate the games back to the anime fandom, I won’t cover them here. Usually I can make some kinda link, but something like Rock Band would be a huge stretch. It’s also why I don’t talk about western movies or TV here — they wouldn’t really fit in.

I was hoping you would switch to a more fansubs.co format (comparison instead of grade) but with commentary. It should save time writing a novel for each group when you can just show that 2/3 are just using CR/Funi subs and which made the script worse. Basically the translation party but still ripping the Hadena’s out there a new one.

If you can do that it would be great but over the top and ultimately not that much better than shopping 4 screenies together with the subber names and then, of course, laugh at the comparison. It would be faster and funnier seeing them all fuck up the same line.

I guess in my infinite wisdom I didn’t think that far and thought you would do it that way. I am lame, I will allow you to flog me with an onahole, preferably unused.

Yes, standard comparison posts would be easier than normal reviews. If I go that route (which I think I will), do keep me in line with the format. Crymore… doesn’t have a lot of horizontal space, so I’m gonna need to figure out a way to mitigate that.

Maybe I am old, but I don’t really care about fansubing (I know it is shit mostly) and very little about anime anymore.
I’m tired of lousy adaptations, ecchi everywhere and faggots as MCs.
Last year I only viewed 2 series completely (Monogatari Series Second Season and Knights of Sidonia), and I lost interest to many others. I just come here to chuckle a little (sometimes I do LMAO), and looking for advice. And that advice consists in you telling me what subs/anime to watch, I am lazy to even take an informed choice. BTW kumawhatever is a big NO.
I moved on to manga, but unfortunately, most of scanlated manga sucks more in comparison, and have to bare with it/don’t read it until a serious company/scanlator picks up any of the series I am reading/planing to read.
And believe it or not, I try to take notice on the mistakes you point out to the translators, I am not an English native speaker (that must be totally obvious to you by now xD) and I am trying to learn ;D.

You’re not alone. Anime can be an overwhelming time commitment. Hell, I get paralyzed by all the choices available sometimes — like spending hour after hour, staring at a screen and thinking about watching anime but never doing it.

So yeah, definitely don’t feel like you’re the odd man out here. Tons of people on the site don’t watch much either.

Because I really try to avoid getting caught in the “trap” of nostalgia. It’s not like I’m against doing them as one-offs, but if Crymore were to ever turn into something like Colony Drop, where a bunch of old guys talk fondly about the “good old days” and refuse to acknowledge the present… Well that’s not something I ever want to happen.

The whole point of doing things on a seasonal basis is relevancy — “These shows are new, people are watching them now, so let’s discover them together.” But if all I’m doing is dredging up the past, as a reader I’d make Crymore a once-a-month-stop at max. And that ain’t really conducive to maintaining a quality community.

To be honest, I’d like to see some anime suggestions/reviews. MAL and other sources are complete shit and are only barely usable when checking which sub group to download. But I, like many other fansubbers I assume, have very little time to actually spend searching for anime that I haven’t seen but might like.

So maybe like a weekly spotlight with anime it’s similar to to give an idea. I’m not sure how this might work without spoiling shows, however. You might alternate through genres to keep up the variety. Hell, you could even make it into a “Did MAL get it (show ranking) right?” section.

Have you ever tried this: http://myanimelist.net/forum/?board=16 at all? Works pretty well from what I’ve seen. I don’t use it though since I’ve pretty much watched all the good shows… While the others are on my PTW.

I was planning on doing a "2014, in review" post, and that woulda made it somewhere on the top 10... but after I analyzed how many hours it'd take me to watch enough shit to make the post have any value... Yeah, that got canceled.

By reviewing short movies, do you mean like the subs or the anime? Cuz if I'm reviewing the anime, I run the risk of overexplaining something that's only 20 minutes long. Like Harmonie, for example. It's a 10/10 in my book, but deconstructing it would just... not be an effective use of anyone's time.

I don’t think it matters. Whether the dream world is a real place or not, only the girl can experience it. I mean, if you’re the only sane person in a world of insane people, aren’t you the one that’s considered crazy?

As long as you keep up your humour I’ll gladly read whatever article you put up, but I guess it’s harder to be funny in a general article when you don’t have fansubs to diss. I’ll see how that works out, good luck.

Ps. I used your reviews to make an informed choice about the release I watch, couldn’t care less about drama game.

I love your articles the most. The main reason why I love crymore so much is because of your humour and writing. like the fansub reviews are super helpful and funny but I literally read every non-fansub article (cons, weeaboo adventures) multiple times. so the new direction sounds great to me. I am still #1 fan.

I actually really like the fansub reviews, but I get that fansubs in general are dwindling. Maybe you could format reviews in the future like the one with Durararax2, where you review both fansubs and official subs and rate fansubs based on if they’re worth waiting for, or pick out shows where the official subs are so bad people should wait for the fansubs.

A question on that front. Are you all looking for official reviews, or would you even just be fine with a blurb at the bottom of a fansub review that says “Yeah, this fansub got a B, and it’s worth waiting for. But the official subs are good enough that you can watch them and still enjoy the series.”?

It’s okay if you want the former; I just want to balance these things in my head so I can assign my workload accordingly.

I don’t think it’s necessary to do official reviews, perhaps include them in translation parties so people can still have a direct comparison. I liked the format of the FFF Assassination Classroom post with the funi example at the end, I think that suffices for reviews.

It’s my first comment but I’ve been coming here for awhile. Every time a new series is out I come to check what are the best subs to go to for that series. I’m not saying this is absolute but definitely good to look at so I can make my own opinion about which one I want.

Yeah this, even if minimalistic subs have degraded the scene a fair bit, there are still some releases that had actual effort put in that was worth switching to, not many resources for finding that out other than here at the moment for English fansubs.

D_S You are correct. Anime is 100% shit and won’t be anything but shit ever again. I’ve watched three series since I quit fansubbing and they were shit. I used to be an extreme fansub loyalist but now there’s no point. CR is better 99% of the time.

I mean, I’ve been on the scene since 2008 — it’s a huge part of my identity, so I can’t exactly say I’m done with fansubs. But the reality is, if even people hardcore enough to visit a fansub review blog aren’t big into fansubs anymore… well, maybe a change needs to be made.

And based on all the feedback I’ve received here (and elsewhere — social media, hell even fucking texts from my friends), I think I made the right call. And quite frankly, I should’ve done this two seasons ago.

I guess I’ll watch how Crymore changes. Let’s hope we still get lots of drama.
Though I guess I’ll have to look for a new way of finding good subs for Anime… While most of the time CR/Funi is acceptable, there are some Anime *cough*AbsoluteDuo*cough* where they do some weird stuff with the translation (Name change: Tooru->Thor). Do you think you could still make some sub reviews for series where OfficialSubs suck?

(By the way D_S, I’m better than you at liking Junketsu no Maria. This obviously means I’m perfectly suited to be an author on this site.)

Based on what people have been saying… I wouldn’t particularly be against prioritizing on failsubs.

The problem with Funimation’s Absolute Duo is that even though they made a localization choice that most people disagree with, the rest of the show isn’t awful. And making a post to bitch about one thing alone seems like it’d be a waste of time.

But yeah, I’ll gladly take Funimation to task if they bomb as hard as they did with Nourin.

What are people watching if not fansubs? Is it all about the crunchyroll rips now? Hadn’t watched anime in four years or so and I just discovered you are (were?) the one of the last guys providing fansub reviews.

The vast majority of anime fans have foregone fansubs in favor of official subs. They either stream them on official sites (Hulu, Crunchyroll, Funimation, Aniplex, Netflix, etc.) or less-than-legal sites (KissAnime, as one example) or download them (from HorribleSubs mainly) if they’re more hardcore fans. There are many reasons for this that I can’t get into with just one comment, but that’s the way of the world now. I’m not going to run Crymore into the ground to support a suicidal scene, so this had to be done in some fashion.

While this is a radical departure from my former policy of branding this as a fansub reviews-mainly site, I’m not hanging up the towel. I’m in the midst of writing my [FFF] Assassination Classroom review, for example. It’s just that now, when I have a really good idea for an article or something, I’ll just go ahead and prioritize that. Whereas before, I would be like “fuck yeah, I’m gonna write about __”, and then I’d look at the list of reviews I still had to do and either start working on those instead, or just stop dead in my tracks and not do anything (far more common). With this, it’s sort of like the opposite. Now when I want to write an article, I’ll just go ahead and do it, without worrying that I’m somehow diluting the quality of the site or disappointing my readers.

I still can’t believe what Crunchyroll became. The last time I went there…four? Five years ago?

They were complete and total shit. maybe 10 or so shows each season. Naruto, one piece, that kind of garbage, some obscure stuff that wasn’t any good, but not the high quality stuff anyone actually wanted to watch.

Better in this way. I mean, as long you don’t stop doing fansubs reviews, TL parties and so I think it’s fine, you don’t need to cover a whole season neither, fansubbers and their followers can make decisions and improve without that.

Though I would try to avoid overcharging yourself with sacred weekly stuff, firstly because people gets bored of them in the long run, and secondly; leaving some brain and time to make better random articles will most likely be better for everyone.

Anyway, I think the best thing about this site over everything else is that you actually interact with your readers, reply their messages and so. Nobody does that! Yet you do, and it’s frikking funny, cool and constructive.

I don’t mean to marry myself to the weekly stuff. I just want to show people that yes, Crymore can have regular content that you can count on. Especially in light of the big production I made around this.

And really? That… That’s like a prerequisite for anyone with an internet presence. Hell, even though I don’t reply to every comment, I at least read it. I mean, if Crymore was pulling 10,000 comments a day, I would pull back a bit, but… shit. On behalf of the anime scene, I’m sorry not everyone is as cool as me.

For authorship… maybe? (Cute pic = tugged heartstrings.) I’m getting way, way more responses to that than I thought I would, so I need to write up some basic details around the “application” process in a new post.

Yeah, I think the same, but surprising you rarely see authors to answer the replies of their work. Of course when the scales gets a bit bigger it’s hard to answer everything, but by answering some replies you’re making it work, as it shows interest and motives people to comment more (and even reply other’s comments).

Good thing you’ll not marry weekly stuff. I mean, weekly stuff is good, but a lot of authors ends up with a massive burden of weekly stuff that kills their creativity and originality, so it should be used with moderation.

I agree with the direction you’re going with the site. It’s definitely more fun to write about stuff you actually want to write about rather than comparing the scripts of 3-4 marginally reworded CR rips per show. Truthfully, in the best possible way, I read Crymore more for the personality than the content anyway.

I haven’t completely dropped anime like Janice, but over the last year or so I’ve only followed one or two new shows per season at best. Hopefully your new approach will help keep the interest alive. Have fun experimenting!